Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Down There

Add my name to the thousands of women who thank the goddess for Toni Bentley’s brilliant review of Naomi Wolf’s latest book (Sept. 16). I especially appreciate her noting Wolf’s misuse of the word vagina to refer to everything “down there.” For several decades I’ve written on the subject of female genital mislabeling, illustrating how the ubiquitous avoidance of the word vulva harms girls and women. This work has been met by a dignified fraternal and feminist silence. Indeed, many educated adults still think that this other V-word refers to a Swedish automobile or is otherwise unspeakable. In our vulva-phobic culture (thank you, Eve Ensler and Naomi Wolf), we give our daughters no name for the whatchamacallit that is the center of erotic pleasure and (short of X-ray vision) all that’s available for visual inspection.

HARRIET LERNERLawrence, Kan.The writer, for three decades a senior staff psychologist at the Menninger Clinic, is the author of “Women in Therapy” and “The Dance of Anger.”